Today’s readings: Ecclesiasticus 3,3-7.14-17; Colossians 3,12-17; Luke 2,22-40.

It is always relevant and pertinent to speak of the family. Given its importance and crucial role in building a healthy society and in enhancing social cohesion, it is also urgent for us believers to stock-take what for many today have become clichés that we keep repeating while ignoring the realities people live.

Standing by God’s Word in general, it makes little sense to persist in absolutising in any way on what constitutes a family. One of the major insights that inspired last October’s synod of bishops in Rome, and which also continues to divide the Church, laity and hierarchy alike, is that there are so many believers out there who do not belong to a mainstream type of family. Yet they are believers and seekers of truth whom the Church cannot ignore and with whom it cannot continue to be preachy and exclusive. This is not in the name of political correctness.

Sure, we cannot just be pragmatic about the family, and I am not saying that the attitude should be that anything goes. Ideals are important and need still to be proclaimed in a culture that has been in upheaval for so long now and that risks losing its bearing as to where it stands and where it is meant to be and go.

In spite of the well-being that we all keep in mind in all sorts of choices we come to in life, there is so much suffering we carry inside and which some more than others perpetuate wilfully on themselves and on others. The choices most people make – at least let us believe it – are probably all made with the intent of finding a home.

Because losing one’s family and having no belonging to a family is equivalent to being homeless. To be at home demand struggles, commitment, enduring love, the ability to forgive, tolerance, humility and patience. These are the virtues that build up our own self and make family life and belonging possible.

However, no matter how we adults think and behave, no matter the reasonableness of much of the choices we make or are constrained to make, we have to admit that children are very often the casualties and that too many children are still suffering intense pain that most probably they will be carrying for life. The breaking of family life uproots emotional attachments.

In celebrating the Holy Family today, many will look in gratitude to their own family for what they have received. But many others will wander in distress for negative experiences lived and endured also in the family. These are both aspects of the reality we live. The family is the place of love and forgiveness, of care and attention, but it can also be the place of internal, spiritual, emotional and physical conflicts carried for life.

The model of family many of us would think of as the ideal is today under so much pressure. Relationships, even within the family, are in crisis for a number of well-known reasons. The family is subject to the social processes that shape us as individuals and that finally give shape to society. We very often see many of these tensions and conflicts aired on the media, in search of remedies or at least in search of understanding what is really happening.

The family is no longer what it used to be and cannot return to that. Most probably we are at a point in time when there is need for the family to reinvent itself. We have to see the family today in view of how relationships have changed and are changing. And speaking of change is not to be understood specifically as change for the worse.

Alongside the negativity we see and hear about, there is so much positive that can be resourceful for the family itself. The family, like Jesus in today’s gospel, is a sign that is rejected, a sign of contradiction because it is too complex to be reduced to one single model or to be understood in terms of stereotypes. We have to let go of time-worn models and look forward to value not the institution of the family in itself, but what in our human nature can still be resourceful to foster enduring love and commitment.